The present invention is in the field of computing devices with a shared keyboard. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods and arrangements to present a list of windows of active applications, giving priority to applications based upon their signaling for attention.
Today, users may have multiple displays per system. Because computing resources are now exceptionally inexpensive, people may also utilize more than one personal computer for work and for play. In order to maximize desk real estate, these users may share a single keyboard and mouse for their multiple machines, either with a hardware solution such as multi-port keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switches, or through the use of network-based keyboard buffer sharing software. This explosion of hardware has led to the use of keystrokes to manage window focus, such as the ALT TAB keystroke. In response to this keystroke combination, the user may be presented with a list of windows generated by active applications on the computers sharing the keyboard. The user may cycle through them by, for example, holding down the ALT key and repeatedly striking the TAB key, to select a window to be given focus. The mouse/cursor may be moved to the window that was selected. In some examples of this function, the windows may be presented in order of task execution. The presentation may be grouped by class of applications (all browsers) or may be restricted to specific applications (only browser windows).